This is an example of one of the Dialogues on the Death of Europe that I am writing. I think the Socratic dialogue format is a helpful way of exploring an issue. Feedback welcome.

Robert: Let’s say it was true that I was a racist, an anti-Semite
and an Islamophobe. Leaving aside the imprecision of these terms, let’s pretend
that some kind of definitive conclusion could be reached on the question and I
was happy to stipulate that the accusations levelled against me were true: I am
indeed a racist, an anti-Semite and an islamophobe. So what?

Andrea: What do you mean “so what”?

Robert: If I’m a racist, an anti-Semite and an Islamophobe,
what difference does it make? Why do you keep throwing out these accusations
every time I try to have a serious discussion about government policy?

Andrea: Because it’s not acceptable.

Robert: What do you mean it’s not acceptable?

Andrea: It’s not acceptable for you to hate people like
that.

Robert: Well, actually I don’t hate the objects of my “prejudice”:
people of other races, Jews or Muslims.

Andrea: Then you’re not a racist, an anti-Semite or an
islamophobe. Or wouldn’t be, if this is still supposed to be hypothetical.

Robert: I have, however, concluded that the presence of
non-Europeans, Jews and Muslims has been in the past, and is likely to be in
future, harmful to Europeans; and therefore that we would be better off without
them. That is a carefully wrought intellectual conclusion, not an emotional
impulse. I’ve arrived at it after long reflection and laborious study and only
after overcoming great inhibitions that were instilled into me as I was growing
up. So would you characterise someone who thinks Europe would be better off
without non-Europeans, Jews and Muslims as a racist, an anti-Semite and an
Islamophobe?

Andrea: I would.

Robert: Then it’s possible to be those things without
hating, with intense antagonistic emotion; calmly, intellectually.

Andrea: Sorry but I think you’re deluding yourself.

Robert: About what?

Andrea: About your calmness and lack of emotion. I think you
do hate those people and just can’t admit it. You dress it up as an “intellectual
conclusion” to make it seem more acceptable, because you probably still have
some of those inhibitions you talked about.

Robert: Let’s, for the sake of discussion, assume that this
is true. Let’s say that I really do hate these non-Europeans, Jews and Muslims.
Again, the question is: so what?

Andrea: It’s not acceptable to feel that kind of hatred, that’s
what.

Robert: But if I did feel this hatred, what could I do about
it?

Andrea: What do you mean?

Robert: Surely if I had these feelings, they would be
non-volitional. I couldn’t just switch them off if I wanted to.

Andrea: I don’t accept you don’t have a choice.

Robert: Think of something you hate, if a soul as pure as
yours is capable of such an ignoble emotion.

Andrea: There are lots of things I hate.

Robert: I bet there are. Now could you choose to stop hating
them if you wanted to?

Andrea: No. But my hatreds are justified. I hate injustice.
I hate exploitation.

Robert: And the people who perpetrate these things?

Andrea: Yes. But my hatreds are good because they have a
moral purpose.

Robert: The “purpose” of my “racism, anti-Semitism and
islamophobia” is to prevent the lives of our descendants being ruined by
misconceived government policy. That is a moral purpose too. We could debate
that, but it’s irrelevant.

Andrea: I don’t think it is irrelevant.

Robert: My point to you is why does the presumed quality of
a person’s motivation affect the validity of what they have to say or indeed
their right to say it?

Andrea: What do you mean?

Robert: Well, you say you hate injustice, exploiters. What
about rich bankers, how do you feel about them?

Andrea: I hate them.

(laughter)

Robert: OK. So let’s say you proposed some new policy that
would cut the pay of bankers, take away their bonuses or somehow limit their “depredations”
as you see it. And let’s say I opposed the initiative and was debating the
issue with you. Would it be valid for me to counter your argument by simply
impugning your motivation for making it, by saying, for example, “You’re just
proposing that policy because you hate bankers”? And we
could then have a discussion about the texture and quality of your feelings
towards bankers, instead of rationally debating the merits of a policy and its
likely or actual effects.

Andrea: You’re entitled to say what you want to say.

Robert: But if I did respond in that way, not just on that
issue but on every issue, if I insisted on impugning your motivation for
proposing a certain policy instead of engaging with the merits or effects of
that policy, serious discussion would become impossible, wouldn’t it? Democracy
would die.

Andrea: How would it die?

Robert: Because the country would simply be divided into
factions, each convinced that the other had an improper or wicked motivation
and should therefore not be allowed to speak or, if somehow won an election
anyway, rule. And after you get to that stage, the only option left is civil
war.

Andrea: Look. I partially see your point about motivation,
although I think you’re being melodramatic. But the analogy isn’t valid,
because the things I hate, or the people I hate if you want to personalise it,
choose to become what they are. Bankers chose to become bankers. The people you
hate had no choice in the matter. That’s a fundamental difference.

Robert: So Muslims didn’t choose to be Muslims? Jews, if you
accept their self-presentation of Judaism as a matter of “faith”, don’t choose
to embrace it?

Andrea: I don’t think they do. They’re initiated into it by
their parents. So it has almost the same quality as race, something they can’t
help.

Robert: I’d say you're infantilising them. In fact, it could
even be argued that you’re being racist towards them.

Andrea: How am I being racist?

Robert: Because you deprive them of agency. You reduce them
to the level of helpless children. Only Europeans make choices for which they
are responsible. Everyone else is just helplessly adrift on a sea of
circumstance.

Andrea: I don’t accept I’m being racist. And I don’t accept
our respective “hatreds” are comparable or morally equivalent.

Robert: So your emotions don’t invalidate your declared
policy positions but my emotions, or the emotions you attribute to me, do
invalidate mine?

Andrea: In my view, they do, yes. Because the objects of my
hatred have made a choice, and the objects of your hatred have not. I’m sorry,
but there’s no place in modern Europe, in the 21st century, for
racism, anti-Semitism and islamophobia.

Robert: But is there a place for racists, anti-Semites and
islamophobes?

Andrea: What do you mean?

Robert: You discuss it in terms of abstractions, racism
instead of racists, anti-Semitism instead of anti-Semites. But whether we cast
it as an emotion or an intellectual conclusion, racism, anti-Semitism, etc. live
inside the minds of human beings. So you can’t really separate the phenomenon
from the person.

Andrea: Well, OK, but what’s your point?

Robert: My question is: is there a place in modern Europe
for racists, anti-Semites and Islamophobes?

Andrea: In my view, no there isn’t.

Robert: But surely you can see that the logic of your
position is exterminationist? This is exactly the same kind of exterminationist
rhetoric employed by tyrants like Stalin and Mao to perpetrate massacres that
were far greater in scale than anything ever carried out by “racists”, “anti-Semites”
or “islamophobes”.

Andrea: How is it “exterminationist”?

Robert: You’re denying me the right to exist.

Andrea: That’s nonsense. How am I denying your right to
exist?

Robert: You say there’s no place for me in my own ancestral
homeland. So where is there a place for me?

Andrea: You just need to change.

Robert: I can’t change. I can’t choose not to be a racist,
an anti-Semite or an islamophobe. You are, in effect, persecuting me for
something I can’t help, something I can’t change. Yet that was the very logic
you cited to justify your anti-racist positions before.

Your position as being far more pernicious and destructive
than mine.

Andrea: How so?

Robert: My position is not exterminationist. I don’t deny
non-Europeans, Jews or Muslims the right to exist. I deny them the right to
exist in Europe. They have their own homelands. But you deny me mine. The logic
of your position therefore is exterminationist. Because, although you say I
have “no place” here, the implication is I have “no place” anywhere.

Andrea: Hating people for what they are is
fundamentally different from hating people for what they choose to do. You have
chosen your path. Or were you always a racist, an anti-Semite and an
islamophobe?

Robert: No.

Andrea: So what made you become one?

Robert: Knowledge. I learned things I didn’t know before and
that knowledge forced me to reach uncomfortable conclusions.

Andrea: Maybe what you think of as knowledge is
pseudo-knowledge. Maybe the facts that persuaded you to change the way you felt
weren’t real facts.

Robert: Maybe.

Andrea: So you might acquire true knowledge in future. You
might learn things that will convince you you were wrong.

Robert: I don’t think so but I must concede the possibility.
If you had told me a few years ago that I would become a racist, an anti-Semite
and an Islamophobe, I would have told you you were crazy. So, given the
extraordinary intellectual tectonic plate shifting I’ve already experienced, it
would be foolish of me to deny the possibility of comparable change in future.

Andrea: So that’s the solution.

Robert: But that’s just a hypothetical possibility. There’s
no way I can force myself to it.

Robert: I do that all the time. The Establishment media is absolutely
in the hands of the Equality Cult. So I am exposed to their point of view all
the time. I also deliberately seek out the screeds of the anti-racists, of the
Jews whining about anti-Semitism, read their books, their periodicals, all of
that. It’s absurd to think that I somehow screen myself from this. And yet
despite all of that, I remain firm in my conclusions. Indeed, if anything,
steeping myself in the rhetoric of “the opposition” only confirms the strength
of my convictions.

Andrea: How so?

Robert: Because they’re just like you, unable to offer
substantive arguments. The whole logic of their discourse is that anyone who
dissents from their ideas must be somehow morally impaired. And should
therefore not be allowed to speak, should not be taken seriously, should not be
responded to. There should be “no platform” for discussion. There should be “no
place” - this sinister formulation that comes up all the time now – no place in
their own country for those who dissent from the elite’s ideology du jour. You
cannot win a substantive debate; you strive instead to prevent that debate from
taking place. And these accusations you fling out so casually are just one
means of doing that. These words – anti-Semitism, racism, islamophobia – convey
a charge of wickedness. Most people are so intimidated when accused of being,
in effect, evil that they will panic and try to prove the accuser wrong. So
instead of a substantive discussion on the merits of the issue we then have
this pantomime-level exchange on the order of “You’re really, really evil”, “Oh
no, I’m not”, “Oh yes you are.”

Andrea: I’m not saying you’re evil. I think you’re
misguided.

Robert: I’m sorry dear but these terms you use carry the
imputation of evilness. They are dehumanising. They transform a political
opponent, an intellectual dissident, into the Demonic Other. It’s an irony,
really.

Andrea: What is?

Robert: Well, it’s usually your side that likes to talk
about how “racists” strive to turn minorities into “the Other”. But it seems to
me that it is your “anti-racist” rhetoric does that. You are demonising people
whose ancestors shared the trials and tribulations of your ancestors for
centuries, millennia; people who tilled the soil together, who fought in wars
side by side, who, through their choices and struggles, shaped the culture, the
character, the destiny of our country, our continent, our civilisation. Now, in
response to what is no more than an intellectual fad, you turn your back on
them and embrace the alien.

Andrea: I don’t accept this is just an intellectual fad. It’s
about right and wrong. It’s fundamental.

Robert: Look, dear. I’ve read about the early years, when
this lunacy began.

Andrea: What lunacy?

Robert: The repopulation of Europe by non-Europeans, in the
late 40s, early 50s. No one at that time, or even into the 60s, not even the most
fervent “anti-racists”, although I recognise that is an anachronistic term, would
have seriously contemplated or endorsed what is now in prospect: that sometime
in the course of the 21st century the European peoples would be
minoritised in their own ancestral homelands. If you had proposed that, if you
had put it up for debate, everyone, and I mean everyone, even the most hardcore
lefties, would have said you were not just an extremist, but an outright
lunatic. Off the charts. A nutter. Yet that is now effectively the consensus of
our ruling class. What would have been unthinkable madness only a few decades
ago is now the orthodoxy of the age. So this is indeed a fad, a transitory lunacy,
a blip in time. But so destructive is the course you have embarked on that this
moment of madness was all it took for you to destroy a millennial civilisation.

7
comments:

I would mention something along the line of: "Simply being a racist, antisemite or Islamophobe does not, in and of itself, undermine my or anyone else's credibility." or possibly asking Andrea "In what way is my credibility undermined? etc."

Also, for more emotional power I would make the pro-European a female and the anti-racist male. It would doubly jar when the male patronises her by calling her "my dear".

I agree with Anonymous @ 10:37 that the phrase "my dear" is a mistake; whilst it is correct that the European male has been gravely emasculated and thus all European society is feminised in order to regard emotion as preferable to reason, it does have a patronising tone. Why not engaged in some male empowerment for a change and convert Andrea to, say, Andrew? (Leave Robert intacto!) I think your use of the Socratic Dialogue format is excellent because it returns the practice of debate, rebuttal and dispassionate disputation to the central role it should have in matters of our highest concerns and hones our minds and rhetorical skills. The only strongly negative aspect is in the final remark of Robert whereby he states that no one, even the 'Left' would have had the intention of what has now (almost) come to pass in terms of European peoples and our civilisation: au contraire, these plans have been in train for at least 150 years and by the early sixties Daniel Coh(e)n-Bendt was proclaiming that 'we' (the Left) must swamp Europe with 'immigrants' and then, 'we' would be able to do all 'we' wanted regarding changing the {Western} world. What is happening is not a result of stupidity, ignorance or misplaced Christian altruism: it is evil and was always thus and I think a final remark should mention this, for, as the thespian once said, "always leave your audience longing for more..." More, please! And pack it with facts, the Left hates facts.

Not certain what year in which he stated the following (he joined the Green Party in Germany in 1978 but was involved in the Paris riots in '68 and his parents were German Jews): "We, the Greens, must strive to this end, that as many foreigners as possible be brought to Germany. If they are in Germany, we must fight for their right to vote. Once we have achieved this, then we have the segment of voters we need to change this Republic." Ever since his notorious German TV interview, in which he admitted sexual 'interaction' with kindergarten children (he was enthusiastic about it), it has become more difficult to source info on him. More people need to realise that the prevalence of paedophilia amongst 'elites' is largely enabled and furthered by support for mass 'immigration' of one ideology which supports this and by the other ideology which in its own core texts condones and permits it.

I see some juicy quotes like this floating around on websites but usually with no solid citations. I need quotes like this for various books I am writing but the sourcing has to be bulletproof. If my books aren't ignored, I can assume they will be attacked. They need to be able to withstand that attack.